From: "Emil Cherrington" <emil.cherrington@cathalac.org>Date: September 26, 2012 2:27:13 PM EDT

Hi Pat et al.,

In terms of a story line for an example of how the intersection of remote sensing data and social media has impacted environmental management, here are the details to the previous story I mentioned: 1. April 27, 2012: We noticed that the fire season had been picking up:

2. May 1, 2012: Ecologist / GIS guru Jan Meerman photographs fires in the distance on Belize’s Western Highway, confirming what the FIRMS data was indicating:

Pat Cappelaere <pat@cappelaere.com>Fwd: Thank you

September 26, 2012 5:29 PM

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3. May 6, 2012: As the fires continued, there was concern that many of the fires detected by FIRMS were occurring in the ‘Central Belize Corridor,’ a wildlife corridor which had itself seen a higher than average number of fires in 2011 following massive forest damage due to Hurricane Richard’s passage over that area in late October 2010:

4. May 24, 2012 – After gap-filling Landsat-7 imagery that was captured on May 8, we provided that imagery to the entire discussion group. Jan Meerman plot the along with the FIRMS hotspots to show that fires had been used to clear a large area that was previously forest:https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=3717084678623&set=o.172113499514796&type=3&theater

5. And following the Landsat imagery and the FIRMS hotspot data, an overflight was also programmed by the Forest Department of the Ministry of Forestry, Fisheries, and Sustainable Development. One of the photographs taken on that overflight (same area in the Landsat-7 image above) shows a canal illegally dug through the protected area: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=3717032237312&set=o.172113499514796&type=3&theater

6. June 4, 2012: Following the overflight, a team from the Forest Department, the NGO Panthera, and the University of Belize visited the protected area where the drainage ditch was being dug and filmed what they saw, demonstrating that the project – whose EIA was still being reviewed – was clearly

proceeding without any environmental clearance. (The video was taken a little over a week following the publication of the images above.) The developers cleared a mile-long strip of forest in a protected area that had been designated in 2010 as a corridor for jaguars and other wildlife: https://www.facebook.com/groups/172113499514796/370167799709364/. In the 1st screenshot below, that’s a worker standing in the extremely deep drainage ditch that was dug through the protected area.

Here you can see the bulldozer at work doing excavation:

And here’s a snippet of the conversation that was generated following uploading of the video to the discussion group. There were 53 comments on the video, spanning from the video’s upload on June 4 to June 21.

And as you can follow part of the conversation above, what started as a number of threads in a discussion group on Facebook first caught the attention of the environment ministry which was alerted to a developing situation, and then it gained momentum and made it to the news media. In early June 2012, the company was issued a stop order by the Ministry, the story was published widely in the media, there was a significant public outcry against the Spanish company doing the development, and they issued a public apology and have been forced to pay a hefty $100,000 fee for breaking the law. In summary, without a doubt, remote sensing data [from NASA] was the trigger for all of it, and the discussion group on the social network (Facebook) provided the medium by which information and updates could be provided to a key segment of the public (i.e. environmental professionals). Emil